With new services surfacing that provide their users with news ways to consume television, there has always been one drawback: the inability to provide what was happening live on television. Sling TV is changing the script that has been written for streaming services and expanding on it extensively.
For 20 dollars per month, Sling TV will provide you will 19 live channels including ESPN, AMC, TNT, CNN and Disney, among others according to an article by CNET. This is far less expensive than purchasing a package through a cable company and comes with none of the hassle associated with contracts and commitments, CNET states that, “Sling TV is the first true Internet-delivered alternative to traditional cable and satellite TV.”
In the digital age we live in, services like Sling TV are part of a continuing trend that started with streaming services like Netflix. Millennials took this trend and ran with it. According to an article from Variety, a new survey released by a consulting firm, Deloitte, shows that “Internet-video services are valued more highly than cable or satellite TV among consumers aged 14-25, a group Deloitte dubs ‘Trailing Millennials.’ For that age group, 72 percent cited streaming video as one of the most valuable services.”
It is for this reason, however, that pay TV is declining in viewership as a whole. The amount of households “cutting their cords” or in other words breaking their contract with cable companies is increasing steadily.
“The number of cord-cutters, which Experian considers people with high-speed Internet who have either never subscribed to or stopped subscribing to cable or satellite, has risen from 5.1 million homes to 7.6 million homes, or 44 percent, in just three years” according to an article by the Huffington Post.
Yes, this trend is real and it is taking over the way we consume content. However, services like Sling TV need to be able to do more if they want to gain any real traction against live cable television. In order for services like Sling TV to survive, they need to provide more than what cable companies are providing.
At the moment, these are just a few of the major problems with Sling: it does not allow for its use through more than one device at a time, pause, fast-forward and rewind features on commercials and elsewhere do not work on a good majority of the channels provided and the video on demand selection is very slim.
All of the above is provided by cable subscriptions, which could be a reason that pay TV is not completely dead, yet.
The proliferation of services like Sling TV, Netflix, Hulu, etc. we as a society have become more dispersed when it comes to how we consume media. This is not just a trend forming in the realm of television, but with print as well. In order to properly contribute to this trend, Sling TV needs to be able to take the positives from cable television and insert them into the new formula we call streaming.